San Francisco Tourists Are Needed, if Not Loved

Don’t look now . . . but I think they’re here again. The tourists, I mean. Our principal source of income. . . . The apple-knockers and hay-shakers for the taking of whom we have overbuilt hotel rooms and restaurants and razed half the city.

--San Francisco newspaper columnist Herb Caen, Aug. 4, 1974

SAN FRANCISCO

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San Francisco tourists seem different somehow from those found in Los Angeles--even though, in fact, they often are the exact same people, out to “do” California in a few summer weeks. In San Francisco, tourists stick out more, appear more out of place, more obviously, well, tourists. In part, this is a function of scale.

If Los Angeles is a large manila envelope of a metropolis, San Francisco is but a single postage stamp. “Greater Los Angeles”--meaning, don’t leave out Disneyland--attracts a few million more visitors than San Francisco does each year, and rakes in several billion dollars more in tourism-related trade. Nonetheless, visitors to the Southland tend to be spread thin, scattered from Anaheim to Malibu. Like everything else in Los Angeles, they are swallowed up by the vastness of the cityscape and easily overlooked.

In San Francisco, tourists can be an almost overwhelming presence, especially in the summer months. This week to walk around certain districts--Union Square, the waterfront, North Beach, Chinatown, Market Street--was to encounter tourists on every corner, clutching guidebooks and shopping bags, speaking in many tongues, trying their best not to make eye contact with the panhandlers.

Short pants and sleeveless tops gave many of them away. “First-time visitors to San Francisco,” the current Fodor’s guidebook notes, “sometimes arrive with ideas about its weather gleaned from movie images of sunny California or from a misinformed 1967 song that celebrated ‘a warm San Franciscan night.’ Sunny, perhaps. Warm--not likely.”

The guidebook also reports that a remark attributed, perhaps falsely, to Mark Twain--”The coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco”--can be found printed on a “perennially popular” T-shirt sold in the city. Alas, visits to several San Francisco souvenir shops produced no such shirts. There were, though, stacks and stacks of fleece jackets.

The city’s Convention and Visitors Bureau keeps close statistical watch on tourism, which for its accounting purposes includes corporate business travel and conventions, as well as the so-called leisure visitors. The figures are impressive. Last year a record 17.3 million visitors spent $7.6 billion in San Francisco, an average of $20.9 million each day.

Despite such numbers, San Franciscans often are quite ambivalent about their visitors. More than 80,000 workers owe their jobs, to some extent, to the tourism trade. Still, there are San Franciscans who will tell jokes about tourists and snicker at them as they stagger, shivering and lost, up one of the city’s steep hills, or stand ever so politely in long lines for a quick, clattering ride on a cable car.

Herb Caen--the late San Francisco Chronicle columnist who, in his long reign as the voice of the city, pretty much invented postwar San Francisco’s idea of itself--used to feast regularly on tourists. Apple-knockers, he called them. Hay-shakers. In the early 1970s, men who wore white shoes were a favorite Caen target.

At the same time, Caen appears to have been one of the first to recognize, however grumpily, that tourism was reshaping the city. By the 1970s, San Francisco’s port business was long gone, having migrated across the bay to Oakland, and its flagship corporations had begun to move large chunks of their operations into the less expensive suburbs.

It was in this time--no one knows precisely when--that tourism emerged as San Francisco’s leading “industry,” a position it holds even more firmly today. And on an August day in 1974 Caen sat down at his manual typewriter and, oozing sourness, informed his readers that the game was up--no more pretending tourists were a mere nuisance, no more wishing they would go away.

“What we want and need and love,” he wrote, “are tourists, elbowing onto the cables, waiting in line for restaurant tables, paying too much for a weak drink in a topless joint to see a person with fake frontage, staying in a hotel room with a view overlooking a parking lot, and walking up Powell and around Union Square, snapping their Instamatics, and giggling and shaking their heads at the freaks. The veritable true White-Shod Head Shakers.”

San Francisco tourists, Caen was conceding, no longer could be seen as mere visitors to a great, working city; now they were its lifeblood. In truth, this may not have been what they, the old-time San Franciscans like Caen, wanted. It is certainly what they have got.